Four Pirate Bay founders jailed

The four co-founders of BitTorrent index and tracker site The Pirate Bay have been jailed and fined by a Swedish judge.

The website was set up in 2003 by Swedish anti-copyright organisation Piratbyran, and offers a search engine for torrents, small downloads that contain information about where files - such as pirated TV shows, music and movies - may be downloaded from other BitTorrent users. The Pirate Bay also hosts BitTorrent trackers, which directly facilitate the peer-to-peer sharing of files using the BitTorrent protocol, on its servers.

Since 2004, The Pirate Bay has operated independently of the Piratbyran organisation and was the subject of a criminal complaint from the Motion Picture Association of America. A raid by Swedish police in 2006 failed to prevent the service from becoming one of the world's largest file-sharing websites.

Today, co-founders Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi were found guilty of "assisting making available copyrighted content". An earlier charge of "assisting copyright infringement" was dropped. In addition to a year in jail, the four were ordered to pay a fine of £2.4m.